Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

Where does literature find its source? Not in thought or feeling alone, else we should look to the cradle for our literature. Not even in the first impulses of speech; the cradle supplies those, and so, in maturer life, do the street, the railway, the shop. Mere language is not a deliberate creation, but begins in an impulse; and those who, like Emerson, have excelled in its use have long since admitted that language, as such, is the product of the people at large, not of the student. But the word “literature” implies that another step has been taken. Language is but the instrument of literature. Literature involves not merely impulse, but structure; it goes beyond the word and reaches “the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line.” Its foundation is thought, but it goes farther and seeks to utter thought in continuous and symmetrical form. We must pass beyond the vivid phrase to the vivid line. Thought, emotion, the instinct toward expression — the whole personality of the man and his skill as an artist — must work together in perfect adjustment, in order to gain this end. Very few men are both strong and skillful enough for this; and that is why,